Monday, 31 August 2015

The Giles Track
starts about 22k south of King’s
Canyon, in the centre of Australia about as far from the sea as it is possible
to get in Australia. It’s one of the few formal overnight walking tracks within a few hundred K of Uluru. In
truth , it’s the only formally marked overnight track south of Alice.

Named after the first European to explore the George Gills range, Ernest Track, it begins
at one of the few permanent surface water features, Kathleen Springs ( and one
can only assume she did) and ends at one of the others, in Kings Canyon. At 22k
it’s a comfortable couple of days , unless you chose to do it in high summer in
which case it may well be a miserable suffocating
deathtrap.

Trine and I were
there in early June 2015, having planned to
walk the track, and the weather
was perfect: the days were hot but not
exhaustingly so, and while there was no water along the track the heat was not
such that we ever faced any issue with the amount of water we could carry.

The track is pretty unprepossessing at the start, winding
almost apologetically up from the Visitor Node at Kathleen Springs (what even
is that?) onto the escarpment.

And that escarpment is where you stay for two days. Headed
northbound, it’s rare that you don’t have the land dropping away swiftly to the
left and an desolate scrubby sandhill plain extending off into the infinite distance.

The track itself is straightforward with not a lot of elevation changes. There are a couple of dry
creek beds to cross, which are beautiful with notable drifts of flood debris
high in the parched trees.

Somewhere around the
misnamed reedy creek ( it has neither) we started looking for a camp spot. You
can camo anywhere between the 3km and 20km markers, so we found a spot
overlooking the plain with ample dry wood and rock platforms that would provide
containment to a small campfire. A phenomenal night under a clear sky roaring
with stars, with dingoes calling in the distance and the wind sighing in the
hill mulga.

Second day was much like the first until we started to get
into the beehive country just south of Kings Canyon. These formations are
fractally self-similar to the much smaller patterns of the sandstone sheets we
had been walking on: huge grids of intersecting cracks eroded over time to
produce dome-shaped formations seemingly built from horizontal layers.

We met a ranger as we approached the canyon, who said
that it was unusual to see people on the
track from month to month. In a log book halfway along the last entry was in April:
we were there in June. We certainly saw no sign of other walkers.

Eventually we arrived back at the spectacular descent into the Kings Canyon Visitor Node (
what even is that) where the chatter of the day trippers carries far into the quiet
hills.

And it is as far as you can get from the sea in Australia,
did I mention that?